Freedom is a cloud-based content management system from Accrisoft Corporation.Accrisoft Freedom specializes in membership and events management, social media, online marketing and e-commerce. Freedom is notable for its highly customizable databases, providing full control over HTML layout and complex filter and search capabilities.
$100
per month
WordPress
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Wordpress is an open-source publishing platform popular with bloggers, and a content management system, known for its simplicity and modifiability. Websites may host their own blogging communities, controlling and moderating content from a single dashboard.
Prior to Freedom I had only used CMSs that were specific to car dealer websites. Compared to those, Freedom is leaps and bounds ahead in every category. Compared to WordPress I would choose Freedom due to the fact that you know your site isn't going to get broken by something …
Compared to every similar products/CMSs I have used, nothing competes with Freedom CMS. It's far more intuitive, far easier to use as a developer (and as the client), easier to customize and better to maintain and assist our clients. Hands down the best CMS solution I've found …
The only thing I believe Accrisoft Freedom is not as well suited is for large e-commerce sites. Accrisoft Freedom actually has an E-commerce module and can do products and online sales, however if this is the majority of what your business does (or your clients' businesses), I would recommend an E-commerce focused CMS. For almost all other circumstances I can think of though, I would recommend Accrisoft Freedom - ma and pa shops on up to a corporation.
If your business relies heavily on content creation, and particularly on blog posts, then WordPress is really the best option you have. But if you don't have a blog, you only need static pages, or you want to build an eCommerce site, then you might want to explore other alternatives.
Hosting and maintenance is taken care of. Due to it being proprietary software, everything is built to work together.
Simple to use. Basic functionality for websites is built in without having to dig through thousands of potential options.
Development is straightforward...no backend languages required. So if someone wants a unique layout for a portfolio, it's very simple to add a new content type and build the new layout using basic html and css.
WordPress is incredibly easy to set up and get running with little to no technical knowledge. Most web hosts will do it for you, since it's so easy.
With thousands of themes available for free and for low cost, WordPress can accommodate any design you can imagine.
The community behind WordPress is generous, and there are loads of educational opportunities both online and in person to learn and connect with other users.
Their preview setup for reviewing page changes prior to pushing them live is not good. You basically have to push things live to see how they will look, then go back and tweak it, while the changes in progress are live on the site. They need a sandbox, or a better preview feature within the backend so you dont have to keep pushing changes live to test out functionality.
Integration with outside tools is non existent. Instead of trying to force people to use their modules or features it would make much more sense to more easily integrate with leading tools in niche spaces.
The UI is pretty old. It could use a big refresh. Things like drag and drop builders and functionality should be standard these days. This is also a plus for non tech savvy users as it keeps their page structures to what works without letting people tinker. But if you want to tinker and be a higher end user Freedom isn't the best bet.
WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.
My rating is based on the knowledge I have of the community that WordPress has had built around it for years now. It's as solid as it comes when you talk about community involvement and expansion. There's no other CMS out there that can match-up with it, hands down.
It's a sophisticated but easy to use piece of software. Many of the content addition pieces are familiar from other pieces of software so there isn't a huge learning curve. And for new areas, there is a lot of info on WordPress.org as well as other WordPress help sites.
Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.
Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.
This rating is based on personal experience only. I believe majority of people would say their support is top notch & 10/10. The only reason I am personally am giving it lower is because I consider my self a much more advanced user of Freedom than their typical Solution Provider developers. Because I am advanced, I troubleshoot my own issues pretty in-depth before I even contact Accrisoft support. Therefore sometimes I feel it takes longer to get the researched & specific answer I need vs. a simple support question would.
WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.
Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.
WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution
In all honesty, we have been moving away from Accrisoft Freedom due to its lack of customizability. We as an agency generally prefer open source solutions since our client base primarily consists of those looking for a more custom solution that can be built off of in the future. While yes, these tend to need more care and attention, they have benefited us more.
We have considered and operated within Shopify and Squarespace. Both serve their purpose for niche clients, but we do recommend WordPress as being the superior option. We find that WordPress is easier to use and offers maximum scalability while the others are more challenging to design, code, configure and launch.
WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.
This was the first CMS we had at our company so hard to say positive or negative impact.
Prior to this CMS there was a static site that html files had to be ftp to a company to have the site updated. So from that standpoint it made updating the site much less expensive.
Compared to a tool like Wordpress this is much more secure and easier to manage, but since we outsource that portion of it to the company that built the site we dont realize those gains.